Adam Byram is a software developer in Oak Ridge, TN. These days, he's making our healthcare system better at his day job and experimenting with VR/AR in his free time. You can get in touch via Twitter or Google+.

Published

TWIL – 2016 Week 19

This is the first post in a series of posts called “This Week I Learned”. I’ve enjoyed reading the weekly summaries from local East Tennessee developers such as Geoff Mazeroff, Cameron Presley, and Avdi Grimm that I thought I’d start posting my own version. If I run across something I find interesting, I’m going to make a note and post it in this series. The plan is to do these weekly-ish. These are more for my own benefit than anything else, but with any luck, you’ll see something interesting as well.

Technology

Codestock 2016 Sessions
I’m excited to see the lineup for Codestock 2016. Lots of great talks about all kinds of topics. I was one of the conference organizers for the past few years, but this year I’m excited to be a regular attendee so I can actually attend all the great sessions. I’m sure this year’s conference will be the best one yet. If you’re in or around Knoxville, TN, you should definitely check it out.

Getting Ready for ASP.NET Core RC2
I’m trying to follow along with the progress on .NET Core and looking forward to using the new ASP.NET on Linux. Shawn has been staying on the bleeding edge, so it’s a nice preview of what things are changing at the code level before RC2 is officially released.

Create a Desktop App With Angular 2 and Electron
Learning a bit about building an Electron app with Typescript + Angular2. For what it’s worth, this article is pretty out of date and does require changes to get it working with the latest Angular2/Electron. I’m sure there are some better pre-packaged getting started samples, but this one got me what I needed to play around.

Service Fabric Party Clusters
I’ve held off on trying out Service Fabric since I didn’t want to spent too much just to build out a sandbox environemtn. It turns out, Microsoft actually has a sandbox you can use for free. I haven’t actually deployed anything to it just yet, but this is definitely on my todo list.

.NET Rocks! – Show 1293 – The Evolution of Services with Juval Lowy
I can’t say I total grok everything Juval was talking about since it was very fast paced and at a very high level, but it peaked my interest. It’s something I’d like to dive into a bit more. The idea is that quite literally everything should be a service (e.g. he mentions things as low level as an Integer service). Lots to digest.

Hanselminutes – Practical Containers for Developers with Aja Hammerly
Really interesting hearing more about the benefits of containers and Kubernetes in particular. Kubernetes is definitely on my list of things to research more & maybe spin up in a test environment. I’ve thought about using Docker on some of my hobby projects, but I’ve been looking for a way to manage multiple Docker containers. It sounds like Kubernetes is a good candidate for that task.

Health

2 Keto Dudes – Show 10 – Alcohol
I’ve been on a low carb diet for about a year and a half now. I haven’t been doing keto and I don’t really drink either, but I found the show to be really interesting.

2 Keto Dudes – Show 11 – Newbies
In this show, they talk to Carl’s daughter who recently started on a keto diet. It’s interesting to hear her experience just starting out.

Life

Being a parent sucks (but not the way you think)
As the parent of a toddler, I think this article does a nice job of articulating what it feels like to be a parent. I can totally relate to this even this early on in my parenting experience. I’d say this would be a great read for expectant parents, but I don’t think I would have been able to appreciate this prior to actually becoming a parent.

Fun

Kaggle – State Farm Distracted Driver Detection
I’ve wanted to mess around with machine learning for a while, but couldn’t find a good project that needed it. This past week, I discovered Kaggle which is basically lots of challenges (some for money, some for fun) that all need machine learning. The nice thing about this site is that it gives you training data, test data, and a way to actually rate how well your algorithm worked. This particular challenge is one where State Farm took lots of driver facing dash cam photos and they want you to classify them. The idea is to detect if the driver is distracted and if so, what caused the distraction (e.g. phone, drink, talking to passengers, etc). I don’t know that I’ll actually be able to solve this one, but it’s something that’ll give me a real world problem to try to solve (with the data needed to solve it).

Birth of the almost-fully 3d printed Automatic Cat Feeder
My cat has had an automated feeder for many years, but it’s starting to have enough issues that I’m thinking about a replacement. I’m toying with the idea of building my own 3D printed, cloud connected cat feeder. Lots of the projects use laser cutters and/or PVC to build a cat feeder, but this one is all 3D printed (except the wooden enclosure). It’s giving me some ideas that I could prototype on my Lulzbot TAZ.

Adam Byram is a software developer in Oak Ridge, TN. These days, he's making our healthcare system better at his day job and experimenting with VR/AR in his free time. You can get in touch via Twitter or Google+.